[Haskell-cafe] [HF-discuss] Do something about Cabal?

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 11/12/2020 16.24, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Am 11.12.20 um 10:50 schrieb Bardur Arantsson:
>> FWIW, I do try to do this for my packages, but I'm very confident that
>> all of my packages probably have misleading lower bounds.
>>
>> It seems to me that some automated tooling is needed here, e.g. to try
>> building/testing with e.g. all deps at the lower bound, all deps at the
>> highest bound, etc.
> 
> With indirect dependencies, you can run into combinatorial explosion
> problems (number of combinations is roughly exponential with dependency
> chain length, give or take a few orders of magnitude).
> 
> Just something to keep in mind when discussing design alternatives.
> (I don't know what designs would even make sense, or what kinds of
> metadata would be available to help guide version selection.)
> 

Indeed, it's a difficult problem with no obvious solution, but given the
combinatorial explosion issue, it's probably better to (somehow) leave
it up to a computer to explore that space rather than humans. :)

Regards,